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The boxes at my door were plastered with red drawings of bugs and the blunt warning: “Live Insects.” I could hear audible scratching and shuffling—and even what I thought was an errant “chirp”—as I placed them on my kitchen counter.

I slowly opened the first lid. Out poked two antennae, followed by the head of a cricket. I lifted the lid higher and saw dozens of them hopping around. Inside the second box, a thousand mealworms wriggled over an egg crate.

The first ingredients for my dinner party had arrived. Gagging slightly, I moved the boxes to my fridge.

Funny how people get grossed out about eating ants, cockroaches, and scorpions, but are okay when it comes to shrimp, crab, and lobster, which are basically the ocean version of the same class of animals.

In season there’s a similar sauce in Mexico, I’ve had around Puebla ( Pahuatlan). People do eat ant in tortillas, but I find the taste to be really too much, its weird, a bit pungent, hard to describe… But when its in the hot sauce and you eat eat in a taco with, eggs, meat even cheese, its really delicious and odd at the same time. But if a local ever says, “Tourists love this” it means that locals don’t touch it with a thirty foot pole 😉

Compared to sauce like ketchup or Sriracha, Kumache hot sauce would be more healthy with that protein.

Some crime scenes don’t have bodies. What they have is a place where a body was, and a suspiciously large amount of maggots. Up until recently, the maggots could only have been a very bad sign. Now, it seems that maggots can help genetically identify their last meals.

For a long time, people with schizophrenia have reported feeling as though their thoughts and actions were controlled by an outside influence, and people didn’t understand why. One experiment, involving crickets, may have shed some light on the neurology behind that feeling.

It’s interesting how much detail the article goes into for the sake of explaining why we [generally] can’t tickle ourselves. There’s an experiment that was demonstrated on QI about placing your hand next to a fake one, and someone else brushing the fake hand. After a minute (or less for some), people reported feeling the brush strokes on the fake hand.

The beautiful animal in the photo above is a Beaded Lacewing. While the adults are delicate and lovely, they begin life as ferocious tiny predators lurking in the nests of termites. These larvae live unmolested in their nest, silently striking down termites from behind—and for one species, with their behind.

Bug-eating evangelists like to talk about how crickets are caloric magic, claiming the insects can transform table scraps into a crunchy, healthy protein. A new study debunks at least one aspect of what’s being touted everywhere as the food of the future.

You may feel squeamish about chomping down insects with their eyes, legs, and antennae still intact, but would you eat insects if they were disguised in butter and sugar-filled cookies? We baked chocolate chip cookies made from pulverized insects and brought them to our office where our brave coworkers tasted them.

Some time between taking those smelly cricket cookies out of the oven and feeding them to our officemates, it occurred to us that we had made cookies out of meat.

According to Emma Kowal of Harvard University, yawning evolved in our hunter-gatherer ancestors to be a highly efficient method of bug-consumption. Her argument is thoroughly and impressively researched, logically presented, undeniably captivating, and hilariously wrong.

In 1841, an invasive water mold began to infect the world’s potatoes. Starting from Mexico, the infectious agent of blight traveled up through North America, then crossed the Atlantic. Eventually it reached Ireland, where, as the journalist Charles Mann described it, “four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.”

The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action. The question of avoiding starvation becomes harder still if some apocalyptic event causes the whole world to starve. How might a government prepare for a worst-case scenario?

This is a question Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, and electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Technological University, began to think about while working on providing low-cost drinking water to the developing world. He found the prospect of disaster terrifying. “This would make us no better off than the dinosaurs, despite all of our technical progress,” he told me. “Humanity is too smart for that.”

Years back, a coworker told me about a book called “The Death of Grass“. It’s fiction, but the idea was that we take for granted the technology we have at our disposal. And more importantly – we are a population with largely no ability maintain or repair what we currently have. On a similar vein, “World War Z” speaks about roles and jobs after society broke down – some people were classified as “non employable” or something to that effect. That their profession and/or skills provided no immediate benefit to survival… I also know of many who stopped pursuing agriculture related bachelor degrees because they knew that food is not the issue – it’s politics that keeps food from mouths.